A Promising Strategy Against SARS-CoV-2 Infected Patients: Antisense Therapy

Abstract

<p></p><p>As of July 25-2020, 643,412 people in more than 215 countries have been victims of the new type of coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Thereby, there is a huge effort to develop a strategy to treat, and or prevent people from SARS-CoV-2 infection. Those efforts could be mainly categorized as drug repurposing, anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from people who recovered, and vaccines. However, there is currently no specific treatment available against SARS-CoV-2 infected patients. That`s why many new approaches and ideas are still studied every day for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infected patients. Antisense therapy is one of these promising approaches to target SARS-CoV-2 genomic RNA specifically and inhibit its activity upon incorrect viral RNA processing. In this study, antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) candidates targeting SARS-CoV-2 genomic RNA were designed. High-scored ASOs with a high potential to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 replication and transcription by inducing cleavage of the viral genomic were determined among ASO candidates. For the future, those promising ASOs can be synthesized followed by required modifications and test on SARS-CoV-2 infected Vero cells to screen their efficacy for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infected patients.</p><br><p></p>

Structure-based design of antisense oligonucleotides that inhibit SARS-CoV-2 replication

“…We call this the "target RNA folding problem" in ASO designs. Current ASO design strategies either avoid targeting structured regions 10 or simply rely on tiling target sequences and screening large numbers of ASOs. The inadequate consideration of structures has resulted in the failure of many ASO candidates and leaves important structured targets as inaccessible.…”